Washington Post editor Jim Brady wants to put an end  to the "back alley environment" on the Internet.  His feelings and those of some of his subordinates (in particular, Deborah Howell), have been injured in the past  by comments that Brady felt were the kind of thing you'd find "carved on the wall of a public toilet stall."

The solution, Brady says, is to end Internet anonymity.

"People say things online they would never say when disagreeing with someone at the dinner table.

Mcjoan earlier blogged the Idaho Statesman story on the polled it commissioned from M-D on the state's hot races. Bizarrely enough, the story didn't include the actual numbers. It may have been the worst-written poll story ever. Thankfully, the numbers emerged elsewhere.

Mason-Dixon for the Idaho Statesman and ABC 6. 10/23-25. Likely voters. MoE 4% (No trend lines)

Attention: READ THE RULES

Ben's old job is open and Jim Brady needs to buy a vowel or two to solve the puzzle of how to replace Box Turtle Boy. He's already stated that the gig is more about entertainment than journalism. We all have an idea of what Jimbo is looking for in their new plagiarist.

Rules:
1. One entry only. If more than one entry is received only the first will count, if you are caught, maybe not. Ok, this is just a guideline.

2. Entry length: Standard 5 paragraph format. Or not. Could be shorter. Just keep it entertaining and in the style of Benny: bad, nasty and "derivitive". Truthy too. Maybe a bit fascist, yeah.
More:

Dear Jim Brady:

I hear you're looking for a new conservative blogger for Wasingtonpost.com. Well, look no further, sir: I am your man.

I will write you the most knuckle-dragging, lib-hating, thick skulled blog in the world, and we can call it Redder State.

Now, look, I was raised in Kansas. I mean, how much redder and flippin' American can you get than Kansas? It's in the heart-most of the heartland, the middle of the map. I simply feel the soul of Red State America in my bones, sir.

Things I like include Bush, war, torture, beer, hot chicks, the flag, bear meat, Fox News, crossbow hunting, Jesus, SUVs, the NSA and both readin' and writin'.

Poor Jim Brady, sharp people like Brad DeLong give him lots of clues, but Brady chooses to remain clueless:

A 24-year-old blogger for The Washington Post, Ben Domenech, resigned yesterday after being confronted with evidence that he had plagiarized articles in other publications.

His resignation came after writing six blog items in the three days he worked for Red America, a blog that The Post created to offer a conservative viewpoint on its Web site...

But by late Thursday, the bloggers had found instances of what appeared to be plagiarism, including an article by Mr. Domenech in The New York Press that contained passages resembling an article that ran on the front page of The Washington Post.

Evidence of one instance of plagiarism first surfaced on the liberal blog Daily Kos on Thursday. [Kudos to Oregon Guy for getting the plagiarism search started.] A comment posted on the blog said a passage from an article by Mr. Domenech was nearly identical to a chapter from P. J. O'Rourke's book, "Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People."

Other articles that contained passages that appeared to be copied were published in National Review Online, The New York Press and The Flat Hat, the student newspaper at the College of William and Mary, which Mr. Domenech attended.

Jim Brady, the executive editor of The Washington Post Web site, said that he knew that Mr. Domenech would be controversial but that a background check before he was hired did not reveal plagiarism.

"We've been catching a lot of grief on the blogs for not catching this ourselves, but obviously plagiarism is hard to spot," Mr. Brady said. He said The Post planned to hire another conservative blogger in Mr. Domenech's place.

Jeeze, Brady just Does. Not. Get. It.  How many times will he willingly put himself forward to be humiliated?  How many times will he voluntarily exhibit his ignorance about online communications, blogging and journalistic ethics?  

Jim, let's break things down for you, make 'em real simple and such:

1. You don't need to hire a conservative blogger, not unless you decide to hire a liberal blogger for balance.  Right now you have a journalist--Dan Froomkin--who doesn't need to be balanced off by a plagiarist.  The last few days should have taught you that there's nothing to be gained by trying to balance fact and analysis (Froomkin) with fantasy and intellectual theft (Ben Domenech).  

2. Acknowledge the fact that you already hired the best conservative thinker and writer you could find in Ben Domenech.  If the best person you could hire to fill your conservative quota is an intellectual thief, why would you want someone even worse than Ben Domenech?  I mean, really, Ben Domenech wasn't hired because of his political connections, was he?  You hired him because he was the best person for the job, right?  And if the best person for the job is an intellectual thief, then the second best person for the job will certainly be worse than Ben Domenech.

3. If you need to assign others to do a background check on potential hires, and all of you find that using Google is too difficult or simply beyond your intellectual or industrial capacities, you really should resign.  One of the most basic tasks anyone performs online is a Google search.  If you and the people you hire to do background searches are so lacking in the scrupulous care with sources one would expect from a journalist that you can't even Google some texts from potential hires, you don't belong in journalism.  

Mr Brady, you got embarassed by a bunch of informed, curious amateurs at Daily Kos who in a matter of a few hours discovered that just about everything supposedly written by Ben Domenech was in fact previously written by someone else, including in at least one case, journalists writing for your own newspaper.  We don't possess any remarkable skills, we just exercised a little skepticism, some open-minded curiosity, and a bit of industriousness.  Apparently these characteristics aren't part of your personality or professional performance.  

Add these shortcomings to your decision to shut down comments when your paper's ombudsman screwed up facts about the Abramoff scandal, your decision to publicly insult one of your own writers (Froomkin), and your repeated dismissal of blogs, and it's clear that you're unsuited to be the online editor for one of the nation's leading newspapers.  If NYT executive editor Howell Raines had to take a fall for the Jayson Blair scandal, you should take the fall for the repeated insults to your publication's journalists and readers.  Step aside, and let someone with integrity, respect for your readers and your craft, and professional skills and ethics take charge.  If discovering blatant serial plagiarism like that of Ben Domenech is "hard to spot," you obviously need a rest.  

After reading Jim Brady's boilerplate note about Domenech's resignation this morning, I was nonplussed, but a few comments he made to Howard Kurtz left me thinking that there might be the glimmer of recognition here about just what a bad decision this was, and that maybe jumping in with both feet to repeat it would be a mistake. Actually, it was a single phrase -- by the next, it was clear that he doesn't really get it at all.

On liberal blogs and Web sites--Salon's lead story this morning was "A Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Plagiarist"--many commentators said there was no equivalence between a Republican activist who co-founded the site RedState.com and Post.com journalists who are viewed as leaning to the left. Brady said that was a "fair criticism" and one he will keep in mind in looking for another conservative blogger. "We're certainly likely to look for someone with a more traditional journalism background," he said.

For starters, it was mere days ago when washingtonpost.com's Opinions editor Hal Straus was falling all over himself to say:

"Washingtonpost.com hires writers for their ability to add something substantive to the national conversation. As best as possible, we look for that ability regardless of political labels."

Mmm-hmm. But now Jim Brady flatly acknowledges that they've got a political quota to fill -- they want a hard-right conservative.

Mind you, they need a "conservative" voice because George Will and Charles Krauthammer are basically Communists, when it comes right down to it. Really, I can see the overwhelming need to balance voices like that with a little sparkle from the "Coretta Scott King was a communist" -slash- Michael Moore is fat -slash- gay taunting -slash- "hey everybody, look at this neat article I found accusing black American leaders of supporting racial cleansing" wing of the party, and I can indeed see why Brady might feel those views were indeed underrepresented in civilized society, though I cannot fathom why he thinks that represents a problem.

Anyway, so now we know.

As amply demonstrated, Ben Domenech is from the Hewitt-Malkin-Coulter wing of the party. If that's really the direction the Washington Post still wants to go in -- the kind of rhetoric they want associated with their name, for a nice change of professional pace -- then they're welcome to it.

But Brady and others, you're really still missing the whole point.

This isn't about "balancing" the alleged closet liberalism on the part of Froomkin, or any other Washington Post figure. Conservatives don't give a damn how many of their fellow conservatives are on your site -- so long as your paper continues to report facts they don't like, or media critics like Froomkin factcheck the more mindnumbing elements of political spin, those conservatives are still going to attack the paper itself as being hopelessly "liberal." Journalism is the liberal part. From Horowitz to Hewitt to Limbaugh, these people hate you. You can't appease them, because there's no such thing as an acceptable "level" of partisan hackery that will offset actual journalism or inconvenient facts. They'll only be happy when you kill the journalism -- or at least stop reporting the facts surrounding the more inconvenient stories.

Every time you "balance" factual reporting with more cheap, uninformative punditry, you weaken the value of your own brand, and the perceived credibility of your entire organization. That may indeed be the niche that Fox News has shown the way to, but I think you'll find the kind of people who watch Fox News aren't big readers of papers like yours -- and it is not at all the given that you think it is that they might be readers, if you only dumb down the content enough and add Michael Moore fat jokes.

Take a look at a hardcore "conservative" news site, sometime. Is that what you're trying for? Is that what you want a "taste" of, mingled with your journalism?

By all means, stand by your decision to balance someone accused of being liberal with a professionally partisan conservative; to balance those with excellent credentials with someone with none; to balance facts with spin; to balance journalism with hackery. It sounds like you've got the glimmer of understanding on just how bad an idea that was, but it doesn't sound like, even now, you understand the basis of the conservative attacks against you.

They're playing you for chumps. And you're taking it, and people like the truly incompetent Deborah Howell are actively promoting it. Considering that this is the exact same blustering "working the refs" strategy that the right has used the last ten years to install incompetent, weak and acquiescent reporting, it really reflects incredibly badly on your managerial and editorial competence that you continue to fall for it.

You're a newspaper, damn it.  Start acting like one again. For starters, install a management team that doesn't make news itself on a regular basis through its botched announcements, contradictory statements, humiliating hirings, and blatant incompetence. You've got, at this point, zero credibility left on either side of the political aisle.

Jim Brady didn't get it.

He went out, under pressure or with an axe to grind, who gives a shit, and found someone he or someone else thought was in that fat part of the curve of Young Conservatives.  What he actually found may have been that.

I hope Brady has learned that the Washington Post's job is not to parrot the wildwest biosphere of the blogs, but rather to report facts and illuminate issues.  Sometimes, commentary is called for, and the Op-Ed pages are rarefied real estate for legitimate opinion writers.

I think of the traditional media, papers, broadcast radio and TV, as the keel of my information ship.  Sure I know some outlets are biased, and some aspire to bias, but the fact that I'm here (posting on DKos) I think should imply that I know how to pluck the real from the fake and the bent.  Bottom line:  traditional media is a reference tool.  Use it as a starting point.

More on the flip...

Dear Washington Post,

I'm sorry to learn that you decided to fire Bob Woodward's esteemed colleague, Ben Domenech, earlier yesterday and waited until this afternoon to share the news.

As Matt Stoller points out, the lesson that the WP needs to take away from the Domenich Debacle is that Appeasing Nazis Doesn't Work.  (Just ask Neville Chamberlain.)

Our lesson is that We Can Make A Difference.  After all the whining about how helpless/hopeless we are, we just pulled off a major coup.  If we hadn't stepped up to the plate, Domenich's crimes would likely never have been found out, as no media institution would dare on its own to offend the Republican Noise Machine by probing one of its members.

Which means it's time for Phase Two.... (more after the jump)

The question is not whether Ben Domenech's ties with the Washington Post will be severed.  The only question is when. (The answer was 1:17 EST; see update below.)  Journalists take plagiarism seriously, and the Post can not hope to prevent a revolt in their news room if they continue to feature other people's writings posted under the byline of Ben Domenech.   (This is especially so since Domenech has in the past plagiarized the writings of the Washington Post itself).  Howard Kurtz started the Post's walk-back on Domenech in today's edition, mentioning that the appointment of Domenech had "touched off an online furor," and then finally, in his 9th paragraph, getting around to mentioning "what appeared to be instances of plagiarism from Domenech's writing at the William & Mary student paper."  Kurtz' seemed to suggest that Domenech's serial plagiarism is just a sideshow to the "on the one hand/on the other" disagreement on his political beliefs.  

Expect to see Kurtz' approach adopted by the wingers.  They'll argue that it was the merits of his arguments that upset progressives, and that it was unfortunate that the liberal Washington Post chose a weak candidate to represent conservative views when there were so many more deserving candidates.  They'll claim that Domenech dishonored many of their arguments and beliefs about politics and America.  But that's a dishonest argument, because Ben Domenech didn't just parrot conservative arguments about class opportunity and merit, his story exemplifies the dishonesty of the conservative view of America.

Ben Domenech did not get his position at the Washington Post based on merit.  He got his position because of connections.  He was home-schooled in part because his family--unlike most American families--could maintain a comfortable living with only one parent working outside the home.  He got in to William and Mary, but he did not come close to graduating.  (And given his penchant for plagiarism, one would have to wonder if intellectual thievery prompted a forced departure from William and Mary.)  Nevertheless, despite no degree or significant life accomplishments, he got some patronage jobs in the Bush administration, no doubt because his father is an upper level GOP apparatchik.  He has gotten bylines over at that bastion of heartless blue bloods, the National Review Online.  He was a founder of Redstate.com.  (And can you believe those clowns have shut down comments from new members, banned anyone who criticizes Domenech, and are actively defending this thief?)  And he parlayed all those connections in to getting the Washington Post gig while still in his mid-20's.  

Would anyone recognize a similar career trajectory of some schmoe from a working class community outside the DC/NYC/Boston/LA/Bay Area metro areas, who went to a state university, got great grades, but whose blue collar parents didn't have the connections of a Ben Domenech?  Especially within the context of the current GOP, somebody with that background (and whose family wasn't tightly connected with politically powerful religious leaders) might as well be a feral child.  Even with a college degree, intelligence, industry, drive and maybe some experience, somebody without the connections of a Ben Domenech almost certainly would not get the opportunity to work in a presidential administration, write for a major opinion magazine, and be awarded an opinion gig at one of the country's major national newspapers before the ten year anniversary of his graduating class.  

After Ben Domenech's dismissal/resignation from the Washington Post--and his employment with the Post will be ended, very soon--you'll probably see some conservatives complaining that Ben Domenech screwed up an opportunity that would have been better given to someone more deserving.  But that's a joke, because it accepts the conservative belief that opportunities like those squandered by Ben Domenech are typically earned.  Too many of such opportunities awarded to twenty-somethings aren't dispensed on the basis of merit and equal opportunity for all people regardless of class or social, political and business connections.  We live in an age of increasing crony capitalism, and the Bush administration exemplifies crony government, and too often connections determine who gets the good opportunities in business and politics.  The conservatives will argue otherwise, but what the Domenech fiasco shows is that conservative cronyism has simply spread in to American journalism.  

Update [2006-3-24 14:28:51 by DHinMI]: He's gone.

From Jim Brady's notice, just posted:

In the past 24 hours, we learned of allegations that Ben Domenech plagiarized material that appeared under his byline in various publications prior to washingtonpost.com contracting with him to write a blog that launched Tuesday.

An investigation into these allegations was ongoing, and in the interim, Domenech has resigned, effective immediately.

When we hired Domenech, we were not aware of any allegations that he had plagiarized any of his past writings. In any cases where allegations such as these are made, we will continue to investigate those charges thoroughly in order to maintain our journalistic integrity...

We appreciate the speed and thoroughness with which our readers and media outlets surfaced these allegations. Despite the turn this has taken, we believe this event, among other things, testifies to the positive and powerful role that the Internet can play in the the practice of journalism.

He just CAN. NOT. mention that it wasn't just generic "media outlets" that "surfaced these allegations." (And "surfaced these allegations?" What kind of crappy writing is that?) No, Brady can't admit that some bloggers and readers put in more due dilligence in vetting their quota hires than did the Washington Post. Like I said, crony journalism.

The see-no-evil monkeys over at RedState have come up with a brand new defense for poor Ben: Jim Brady set him up!

Blame the Washington Post for Ben's Youthful Indescretion

This was inevitable of course.  These wingnuts will turn on the Washington Post and go ballistic when Ben is forced to resign.  It was all the media's fault.  They setup poor Ben and made him lie and steal.

As Hunter laid out below, the Washington Post's special quota hire Ben Domenech is quite a plagiarist.  He's not just some one-off plagiarizer, he's a recidivist plagiarist.  But don't look at him as the main problem in this fiasco at the Washington Post.  Ben Domenech is just the example of an ethically and intellectually bankrupt conservative movement, especially its bloggers.  And the fact that he was even hired shows that the Washington Post is craven for trying to strike a balance between political fact and fantasy, and is itself so ethically bankrupt that it has forgotten the lessons of the most infamous period of the newspaper's history.  

A major element of this scandal at the Washington Post is that it perceives a need to balance out the factually-informed work of a serious journalist with the fantasy rants of a rightwing shill.  As Gilliard points out:

The Post does not have a left blogger. Dan Froomkin is a journalist. Racist Redstate Ben is a political operative. See the difference.

Apparently the folks at the Post were too concerned about toadying up to the wingers to notice that distinction.  They were intent on balancing out Froomkin's reality-based analysis with screeds from a winger.  We should assume the Post hired the best person they could find.  The problem for the Post, therefore, is that the intellects and professional ethics of conservative bloggers are so risible that the best person they could hire ended up being a plagarizer.  

By doing a laughably bad job of due diligence on Domenech, the Post has earned all the mockery and derision coming their way.  But people who care about the Post probably aren't laughing, because this scandal has too many resemblances to the darkest moment in the history of that newspaper: the Janet Cooke scandal.

Let's take a look at this column about the Cooke scandal and other pertinent issues, titled The Perils of Press Arrogance:

The series of fabrications that resulted last week in the resignations of the top two editors of the New York Times is a calamity for all of American journalism...

Anyone who can gloat at their discomfiture is worse than a fool. This is far more than a personal embarrassment or a black eye for the Times. It is a serious blow to the credibility of the press, and it comes at a time when public trust is fragile.

Those of us who work at The Post know what our friends at the Times are going through. In 1980 a talented colleague of ours, Janet Cooke, concocted a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict, which The Post played prominently on the front page. It was not until the story was awarded a Pulitzer Prize that it and its author were exposed as phony.

We live with that legacy every day. No matter how much distinguished work is done by this staff -- and there is a wealth of it -- it does not erase the enormity of the failure to prevent the Janet Cooke fiasco...

If the Times' leadership is wise, it will recognize this institutional disaster for what it is and reflect on the culture that produced it. It will not simply change editors but change attitudes.

The besetting sin of big-time journalism is arrogance -- the belief in our own omniscience, that we know so much we don't have to listen to criticism. And the Times as an institution leads the league in arrogance.

More than 35 years ago, as a newcomer to The Post, I recognized that we were dangerously cut off from the forces that were reshaping this country. In the 1968 presidential campaign, we were (and I definitely include myself) slow to pick up on the anti-establishment movements that propelled such different candidates as Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, George Wallace and Richard Nixon.

The next year, I was on sabbatical at the Institute of Politics at Harvard when elite students trashed Harvard Square in an antiwar demonstration and forced the university to shut down weeks early.

Returning to the paper, I showed no special wisdom in suggesting to Executive Editor Ben Bradlee and Publisher Katharine Graham that any institution as large and visible as The Post could expect to be targeted by anti-establishment forces. It was one of many factors that led them to hire the first ombudsman at The Post -- a professional journalist whose sole responsibility is to respond to reader complaints and provide an independent critique of the paper's performance.

When the Janet Cooke story exploded, the ombudsman on duty, Bill Green, conducted his own investigation, and his detailed report to readers was the first crucial step toward restoring the paper's reputation.

By contrast, the Times management has consistently rejected having an ombudsman or readers' representative, asserting that it would enforce its own standards, thank you very much...

The Times has had its comeuppance. Its sins are symptomatic of the press's inflated self-importance. The Times can lead the way back to trust -- if its publisher will.

Who wrote that?  The Post's own Grand Protector of the DC Establishment Consensus, His Holiness, St. David of Broder.  

Ultimately everyone will take that wretch Ben Domenech's advice regarding plagiarists, and forget him.  But has the Washington Post gotten so arrogant that it has forgotten Janet Cooke?   Is the Post so cut off from the forces changing the media that it believes it's OK to have a plagiarist on staff, because if people don't like what he has to say, they can just ignore him?  Do they think all bloggers and all viewpoints are equally valid?  That there's no difference between bloggers like us here at Daily Kos, where we often beat up on the media for disregard of facts and for shoddy reporting and laughably bad arguments, and bloggers like Ben Domenech, who respond to inconvenient facts with laughably bad arguments, shoddy thinking, lying, intimidation, hypocrisy and serial plagiarism?

We'll learn over the next few days if the Washington Post has forgotten the infamy of indulging Janet Cooke's lies.    they shouldn't indulge Ben Domenech's lies.  As plagiarism expert Ben Domenech argued in a similar case, "no quarter" should be given to such lies.  Maybe Domenech will do the Post a favor and resign so he can spend more time with Claude Allen's family.  If not, the Washington Post has only one option: admit they were wrong to try to balance sound journalism with ideology and plagiarism, and fire Ben Domenech.

[UPDATE by DHinMI] As Kosmopolitans and others dig through Domenech's publish output to discover that this guy has hardly written an orginal sentence in his entire life, we're finding he had plagarized all kinds of sources. But pb may have just found the sweetest example of all: in this piece Domenech plagarized a page 1 article from--God, if we just made this stuff up nobody would believe it--the Washington Post.

This Washington Post thing is rapidly becoming a blood bath. We've moved on from Domenech's funeral-day assertion that Coretta Scott King was a communist, or his comparison of the Supreme Court to the Klu Klux Klan. Those are small things. Now it's getting bad.

From Oregon Guy and fleshed out further by James at Your Logo Here -- who is himself on a spectacular Box Turtle Ben rampage -- we learn that some instances of Ben's much-vaunted homeschooled teen wonderism in college actually came from, well, flagrant plagiarism of published works.

...Ben's lyrical stylings on a real party are completely lifted from P.J. O'Rourke's "Modern Manners" - a chapter entitled "Real Parties." I should have known as this is one of the gifts my older brother gave me years ago that did not involve punching me in the nads.

O'Rourke, p.176: Office Christmas parties. Wine-tasting parties. Book-publishing parties. Parties with themes, such as "Las Vegas Nite" or "Waikiki Whoopee". Parties at which anyone is wearing a blue velvet tuxedo jacket.

BenDom: Christmas parties. Wine tasting parties. Book publishing parties. Parties with themes, such as "Las Vegas Nite" or "Waikiki Whoopee." Parties at which anyone is wearing a blue velvet tuxedo jacket.

O'Rourke: It's not a real party if it doesn't end in an orgy or a food fight. All your friends should still be there when you come to in the morning.

BenDom: It's not a real party if it doesn't end in an orgy or a food fight. All your friends should still be there when you come to in the morning.

(And more here here.)

Reader silence found another example, in which Domenech plagiarized an entirely different piece, this time from Salon:

From a Ben Domenech review of Bringing Out the Dead:

Instead of allowing for the incredible nuances that Cage always brings to his performances, the character of Frank sews it all up for him.

But there are those moments that allow Cage to do what he does best. When he's trying to revive Mary's father, the man's family fanned out around him in the living room in frozen semi-circle, he blurts out, "Do you have any music?"

From a review posted on salon.com, published about a week earlier:

Instead of allowing for the incredible nuance that Cage always brings to his performances, the character of Frank sews it all up for him. ... But there are those moments that allow Cage to do what he does best. When he's trying to revive Mary's father, the man's family fanned out around him in the living room in frozen semi-circle, he blurts out, "Do you have any music?"

[UPDATE -- Atrios is collecting example after example of more plagiarism by Domenech.]

[UPDATE 2 -- silence continues to find more and more. Here's a movie review Ben "wrote" for the National Review that contained snippets taken from Steve Murray.]

[UPDATE 3 -- Oh, the irony... he even bylined material to himself that he took from, you guessed it, the Washington Post.]

[UPDATE 4 -- Via Atrios and his commenters again, the examples keep coming.]

That's one way to polish your credentials as an up-and-coming writer -- copy and paste from someone who actually has talent. Excelsior!

More Washington Post news below, because this is just the story that keeps on giving. Someone's getting fired over this one, if the media as a whole has even a shred of ethics actually left.

From the diaries. mcjoan

I think Josh Marshall sums up my feelings towards the newest Washington Post travesty against nature better than most:

I'm embarrassed for the Post. Embarrassed by the Post.

Pretty much. This is, after all, just the latest skid into what at this point is sheer buffoonery by the online Post, after a slide that began with the first utterances of new ombudsman Deborah Howell, and will probably end the precise day that somebody -- anybody -- in the Post management figures out enough about their current situation to send her packing, and probably online executive editor Jim Brady himself soon afterwards for not keeping better control over the whole mess.

Let's be blunt about one thing. It took about three posts to demonstrate that the new Washington Post "Red America" blog (ugh, even the name reeks of faux-Beltway whoreism) is never going to be anything but a fourth-or-fifth-tier backwater. That's not really the point. The larger point is that the Washington Post felt they wanted -- or needed -- to put it online, and put the imprimatur of their journalistic brand behind it.

And in doing so, it demonstrated yet again exactly how far the media has fallen. As Josh said, I'm embarrassed for the Post.

After both Howell and Brady just got through feigning the vapors over accusations of liberal bias, now they are freely embracing and in fact specifically endorsing a voice of conservative bias. After snuffling and preening about the respectability of the Post, and how worrisome that it might be that a claimed liberal twinge might damage the paper's credibility, now we've got them giving big props to the premise that having another abjectly pro-Bush and pro-rightwing voice, well, that's just fine.

The spin is absolutely spectacular. I mean, really. Has there been any example to date quite so roundly demonstrative of just how in the tank the Washington Post currently is?

I wonder if the former sports editor (and now executive editor) of the website will have the guts to reply:

Mr. Brady,

I recall much wailing and gnashing of teeth from you about how the horrible lefties were so uncivil and nasty in their comments vis a vis the Deborah Howell  controversy.

I trust you'll be just as morally aghast about some of today's posts from the right like the one below:

"Lefties suffer from TMS. (Tertiary Moral Syphillis)"

Or does being fair and balanced just apply to appeasing the right?

Tom H

Did anybody else notice that parallels (and tremendous differences) between what happened on DailyKos over the last day or so and what happened with Deborah Howell.  I wish that Jim Brady and Deborah Howell were reading.  Kos made a post about Hackett that many (including me) believed to be ill-conceived and poorly timed.  Kos was attacked vociferously (including by me) on his own Website.  My guess is that if you put the comments Kos received against the comments Howell received they would be comparable.  

After Jim Brady's weak defense of the Deborah Howell incident, I sent him the following e-mail {Note:IN the interest of full disclosure, I have corrected a couple of typos and grammar mistakes]:

"Sorry. Your meager attempt to rationalize the blatant favoritism of your paper (or at least of Deborah Howell, but you wouldn't have gone to such lengths to defend her and cut off the criticisms of her one-sidedness if you did not have the same opinion) and failure to check the facts just doesn't cut it.

One Moonie paper that shills for Republicans in Washington is enough. It is sad to see your once-great paper become a shadow of its former greatness and just another organ to carry water for Republicans. Is the money that great? Is it that important? What about democracy? What about integrity? Aren't those worthwhile values? (See remainder below)

I made this as a comment in another diary, and someone suggested that I make it its own diary entry. I am not good at diaries but here goes...